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Poetry submission: Section A: The axe of the house Section B: ‘Entangled in biographical circumstances’ Claire Askew Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh Year of submission: 2013 I hereby declare that this thesis and the poems contained herein were composed and originated entirely by myself, in the Department of English Literature at The University of Edinburgh. 1 Table of contents Abstract 4 Section A: The axe of the house 6 Anne Askew’s ashes 7 My father's cars 8 Visiting Nannie Gray 10 Driving in snow 11 Natural resources 12 Jean 13 My grandmother's logic 15 A list of things 17 Prayer 18 Gulls 20 The impossible journey 21 The axe of the house 22 i. Hacksaw and burn 22 ii. In the dream 23 iii. Deafening 24 iv. Mary tells you about the break-in 25 v. Housewarming 26 vi. The axe 27 Poltergeistrix 28 Onion 30 High school 31 Mrs Rochester 33 The banker 34 Hate mail 35 Harpies 36 Pica 37 The women 38 2 Mothership 39 The Diet 41 The blues 43 Found poem 45 The picture in your mind when you speak of whores 46 Silver Ghost 47 Minor threat 48 The western night 50 Gunsmith 51 Landscape speaks of poets 53 Allen Ginsberg mourns his mother Naomi 54 Ginsberg in Heaven 56 Thing about death 57 Seefew steading 59 Peninsula 60 What Wordsworth never said about the Lake District 62 To Wakefield 63 Fire comes 65 Barcelona diptych 66 Witch 68 Belongings 70 Highway: Skagit County, WA 72 Greyhound, Seattle to San Francisco 73 Big heat 75 Three haiku at the Museu d'Història de Cataluña, Barcelona 77 Hydra 78 Section B: ‘Entangled in biographical circumstances’: autobiography and confession in the poems of Sharon Olds, Sapphire and Liz Lochhead. 79 Bibliography 143 3 Abstract The axe of the house is a collection of poetry written and collated over three and a half years. The vast majority of the poems are about women: these are women’s voices usually recounting specifically female experiences. Many of these female poems were informed by the confessional mode, as appropriated and transmuted by the contemporary women writers I read and studied. The collection begins with confessions of my own in poems like “Anne Askew’s ashes” and “Jean,” and then moves on to include love poems like “Prayer” and “Gulls,” which are also at least partially autobiographical. Also confessional, but not autobiographical, are the poems at the centre of this collection. These are poems in which women from various different walks of life speak about their inner lives. Some of these women, like the speakers of “Hate mail” and “Silver Ghost,” are my own creation, while others, like “Mrs Rochester,” are borrowed from elsewhere. These poems examine intimate relationships from various angles: marriages, one night stands and vicious rivalries are all explored via a first person narrative. Body image is also a common theme. There are a few poems which are more overtly political, delivering feminist messages about the ways patriarchal society portrays and often ostracises women. “Harpies,” for example, looks at women who are seen to have no sexual worth, while “The picture in your mind when you speak of whores” concerns women whose only perceived worth is sexual, dismissing the various marginalising stereotypes that exist around sex workers. The collection moves farthest away from its examination of the female experience in the poems towards the end. However, these poems form a travelogue in which privilege of various kinds is examined and critiqued. Poems like “Witch” and “Belongings” are still concerned with the lives of women, while “Big heat” uses a female narrator to examine the more recognised privileges of wealth and mobility. These ideas recur in poems like “Barcelona diptych” and “Highway: Skagit County, WA,” but the poems that round off the collection are also attempts to capture a sense of place and space. Throughout this work, there are poems that are particularly interested in liminal space: several of the poems in the collection, including “Poltergeistrix” and “The women” look at the hours and days immediately after death. The space between travel destinations is also liminal, and these final poems attempt to make sense of it – finally succeeding with “Hydra,” which delivers a sense of acceptance and advocates living ‘in the moment’. 4 The critical section, “Entangled in biographical circumstances,” looks afresh at the female confessional poem, most commonly associated with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich. With reference to the works of these literary foremothers, I focus on the ways in which a new generation of women poets has been inspired to adopt this mode. As well as noting the often hostile response of male critics to confessional work by female writers, I examine the very different ways in which Sharon Olds, Sapphire and Liz Lochhead work in the confessional tradition to produce poetry that speaks candidly about the inner lives of women. I also discuss the ways in which the work of these three poets has influenced and shaped my own poetry. 5 Section A: The axe of the house 6 Anne Askew’s ashes All day, the stove has sulked and spat, sucking hard on knuckle-bones of coal. I shed my coat and kneel to sift the ash between the grate's iron teeth – restack the fire-bricks, sweep and scrape – to reinflate this blackened lung. When I am done, my wrists are rigor-mortis grey and ringed with soot like rope-burns, shackles, marks of prayer. In the backyard's bitter air, the ash-pan stutters, spills itself a little in the wind. I make it to the bin and tilt the pan, release a ghoul of smut and dust that dirls and hangs there after I am gone. A blazing witch, as silent as the earth – you are the ghost in every fire I birth. 7 My father's cars after 'Wheels' by Jim Daniels My father keeps his photographs in a cake-tin labelled Cars: on my grandparents' front drive at twenty with his Hillman Hunter in racing green smiling in a violent orange Bond Bug blindfolded his mate Roy navigating six-two and bent nearly double smiling parked in a Lake District lane with my mother and the beige Vauxhall Viva with the dodgy suspension smiling in front of Cartmel Priory Shop with the yellow Triumph Dolomite my grandmother gave him smiling in the snow under trees with my uncle David and my uncle David's grey short wheelbase Land Rover smiling in front of his first house with his brown Mini Clubman van and my mother's brown Mini Cooper and my mother smiling 8 bringing me home three days old in the front seat of the red Mark I Ford Escort smiling dandling my sister on the slick turquoise bonnet of the Vauxhall Cavalier smiling with the navy blue Astra sport hatchback with the Citroen BX he drove 500 miles with no oil in it by accident with his red Fiat Panda and my mother's blue Fiat Panda that my sister and I refused to ride home from school in with the secondhand Punto that dented if you so much as looked at it with my first boyfriend's Micra with my second boyfriend's Nova with the black Frontera 4x4 and that bloody caravan that turned out to be stolen (with their names written on the back of each picture in pencil like names of children Lurch, Pru, Henry, Penelope, Evadne, Myrtle, Genevieve, Sam) smiling. 9 Visiting Nannie Gray We go on Sundays to make her tea. I've known her years, but every week we're introduced. She thrums my name's soft hiss in her teeth, tells you she's sure you and I are for keeps. We bite our lips as she slams round the house, chitters for a long-dead cat, and worried he's missing, puts out fish. She never sits – fluttering like a moth at the nets, she asks you where we've tied the horse and trap, while the red Ford Escort smarts in the drive like a wound. And would I like to see her frocks? And every week I say I would. She spreads them on the bed like relics, recites the names of seamstresses, department stores. There's always one whose floral print she bunches in her fist – flimsy anchor to the past – says without flinching, bury me in this. And that's the moment every week, the heart-stuck lurch as she realises what she is, for just a breath. Then like a child, afraid and angry, she reaches for me, whispers I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 10 Driving in snow We saw it swallow the hill first.